Stempel and other contestants on Twenty-one and CBS’s The $64,000 Challenge told their story to a New York grand jury. Van Doren denied it under oath, and Judge Mitchell Schweitzer, deeply offended by the slandering of a contemporary American folk hero, impounded the record on the ground that it contained accusations which had not been proved. Outside the jury room, Van Doren told the press that he was “sad” and “shocked” by the lies about him. He repeated that he had played “honestly…. At no time was I coached or tutored.”
The trouble with perjury is that those who commit it have no way of knowing whether there is someone who can prove they were lying. There is always the possibility that a Whittaker Chambers has the truth socked away in a pumpkin, and that is what happened to Van Doren. One James Snodgrass, an artist and a Twenty-one winner, produced registered letters that he had mailed to himself one to three days before the programs he was on, containing the questions and answers involved. These were then opened by the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, the same stern tribunal which had been Bernard Goldfine’s, and thus Sherman Adams’s, downfall. The letters confirmed Snodgrass, and the committee, taking up where the Manhattan grand jury had left off, began building a trap of testimony and exhibits for that winning, handsome, loose-limbed, Ivy-clothed son of a distinguished literary family named Charles Van Doren.
They sprung it in October 1959. Van Doren, playing the outraged patrician like Hiss before him, wired the subcommittee a categorical denial of all the charges maligning him, declaring that he had not been “assisted in any form” and that he would be “available” to the subcommittee whenever it wished to question him. Back came a telegram inviting him to appear before the congressmen voluntarily, at which time he vanished. A formal subpoena was issued, but the process server could not find him. For six days the American people did not know whether he was alive or dead. On the seventh day, October 14, he materialized by prearrangement in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, accepted the subpoena, and confronted a packed press conference. He read a prepared statement. “Distressed” by the course of events, he said, he had taken a leave of absence from Columbia and gone with his wife to New England, “to gather my thoughts… in the October beauty of the region.” He hadn’t known he was wanted. The reporters boggled. How could he have been unaware of the subpoena when it was the lead story in every newspaper and news broadcast? Smiling wanly, he said out of respect for the U.S. Congress he would have no further comment until he appeared in the “appropriate forum,” which was to say, its hearing room.
He surfaced there next on November 2, conservatively dressed and obviously tense as he confessed. “I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years…. I’ve learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be. I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception…. I was almost able to convince myself that it did not matter what I was doing because it was having such a good effect on the national attitude toward teachers, education, and the intellectual life.”
In time he became “terribly uncomfortable,” he continued, and “very much afraid.” He begged the producers “several times” to let him lose. They replied that it would have to be done in “a dramatic manner.” At last a glamorous blonde lawyer became a contestant, and one of the producers “told me that… I would be defeated by her. I thanked him.” When the public began to learn that the show had been a fraud, Van Doren said, he had been “horror-struck…. I simply ran away…. Most of all, I was running away from myself.” There was “one way out which I had, of course, often considered, and that was simply to tell the truth.” But “emotionally” this was not “possible.” Then the subpoena was served upon him. “…it was a small thing that tipped the scales. A letter came to me from a woman, a complete stranger, who had seen me on the Garroway show and who said she admired my work there. She told me that the only way I could ever live with myself, and make up for what I had done—of course, she, too, did not know exactly what that was—was to admit it, clearly, openly, truly. Suddenly I knew she was right.” Next morning, Van Doren went on, he summoned up the courage to phone his lawyer, who, when he had heard all, said, “God bless you.” And that was the end of his statement. Putting it down, he turned to the attorney and smiled at him.
It was preposterous. It was the subpoena, not an unknown woman, which had forced him to own up. Furthermore, if he had really been “terribly uncomfortable” on the show there had been no need to plea for release from the producers; all he had to do was give a wrong answer to one question on the air. A Republican member of the subcommittee, Steven B. Derounian of New York, saw through Van Doren’s fraudulence. He said to him, “I don’t think an adult of your intelligence ought to be commended for telling the truth.” But that was just what the other congressmen proceeded to do. Chairman Oren Harris said he wanted to “compliment” him on his candor. Representative William E. Springer of Illinois expressed the hope that Columbia would not “prematurely” dismiss him from its faculty, and Representative Peter F. Mack of Illinois said he trusted that NBC would forgive him. Others said they wanted to “commend” him for his “fortitude,” and for the “forthrightness” of his “soul-searching” statement. Five hours later Columbia, seeing things differently, announced that it was dispensing with Van Doren’s services; NBC discharged him the next day. But that was not a popular reaction. The crowd at the hearing had been with Van Doren, applauding him and his admirers on the subcommittee and greeting Congressman Derounian’s comment with stony silence. Columbia students held a rally to protest his ouster. A poll showed that three of every four Americans felt that faced with the same situation “most people” would have done what he had done, and NBC’s mail favored him, five to one.
No sooner had Van Doren and thirteen other celebrities been indicted in New York for perjury than the Harris subcommittee turned up new evidence of TV fraud. Dick Clark, the number one disc jockey in the teen-age subculture, admitted that he chose records in which he had a financial interest. This was called “payola.” Chairman John C. Doerfer of the FCC in effect defended it. Nobody was harmed by it, he argued, and any attempt at regulation would “tamper with our cherished freedom of speech.” At that point it was discovered that Doerfer himself had accepted payola from one of the big broadcasters he was supposed to be watching. Eisenhower accepted his resignation, but here, too, the public seemed to be indifferent. It is not surprising that viewers who showed no concern over any of this should have accepted the networks’ tasteless programming in 1960. If 1959 had been the Year of the Quiz Show, Variety suggested, 1960 was the Year of the Western. There were eight such programs on CBS, nine on NBC, and eleven on ABC—a total of twenty-four and a half hours of prime viewing time every week.
After seven years of basking in Eisenhower sunshine, the nation’s opinion makers, including those who had supported the President, were becoming restless. As early as 1958 the Chicago Daily News had asked, “Things are in an uproar. But what is Eisenhower doing? All you read about is that he’s playing golf. Who’s running the country?” Subscribers, however, remained apathetic. While the President was in Europe, the Vice President scored a personal triumph in negotiating the end of a 116-day steel strike. Opinion polls were virtually unaffected; the public hadn’t been watching. The newly freed Congo was bleeding in a tragic civil war, and rebellious Laotian soldiers led by Captain Kong Le overturned the pro-Western government of Premier Tiao Samsonith; the average American couldn’t have found either country on a map. At home a newspaper strike halted publication of all New York papers, there was a rash of prison riots, and another of bombs smuggled aboard airliners, including one planted by a greedy youth who thereby blew up his airborne mother, with everybody else on the flight, for her insurance. A survey reported that front pages were unread; readers preferred the comics and sports. When Caryl Chessman was executed in California after eight reprieves, opponents of capital punishment objected, but there were comparatively few of them
, and the general lethargy seemed to be unaffected by a series of particularly brutal, senseless killings. One of them at this time was the murder of a Kansas farmer named Herbert Clutter with his wife, son, and daughter. Time’s account of the crime appeared in the news magazine’s November 30, 1959, issue. Its headline was “In Cold Blood,” and its readers included a writer named Truman Capote.
***
The instant cliché that year was the use of the word “bit” as an all-purpose verbal punctuation mark. Greensboro’s blacks were doing “the protest bit.” Romance was “the love bit,” Metrecal “the diet bit,” and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho “the thrill bit.” The commonplace cropped up almost everywhere, but it was never applied to one department of the federal government. No one ever said John Foster Dulles was doing “the diplomacy bit.” It would have been unseemly, and it would also have been inappropriate, for Dulles belonged to an earlier age, to a craft of statesmanship fashioned by foreign ministers in cutaways and striped pants. His haughty moralizing and simplistic “massive retaliation” had been outmoded by the statistics of Soviet rocket thrust, and in the early months of 1959, as he hobbled back and forth to Walter Reed Hospital in the agony of his last illness, he seemed to realize that the rigidity of the East-West posture which he had done so much to perpetuate was about to become obsolete. He defended it to the last. Grimacing with pain as he left Washington on his final journey to Europe, he told a friend, “If it isn’t cancer, then I feel the trip is too important to be put off. If it is cancer, then any additional discomfort doesn’t fundamentally matter anyway.”
It was cancer. Blasted daily by million-volt X-rays in Walter Reed Hospital or resting in the Florida sun on Jupiter Island, the secretary became preoccupied with his desperate, losing battle with death, and as he struggled the reins of statecraft slipped at last from his hands. Outwardly the world’s balance of power was unchanged. The United States was still committed by treaty to the defense of forty-two nations, and Dulles, to use another emerging cliché, was still a man with tremendous clout. American editorial writers paid tribute to the “wise counsel” and “single-minded strength” of this “indispensable man.” Whitehall sent him word that it was “extraordinarily sorry,” the Quai d’Orsay expressed concern over “the greatest possible loss for the West,” and Bonn regretted that “a spoke” had been “torn from the wheels of Western policy making.” But that was all diplomatic cant, and Dulles must have known it. Although he kept in close touch with the White House and his own office by telephone, alert for any sign of cold war heresy, to those who could read the signs—and he was one who could—it was clear that moves toward a detente between Washington and Moscow awaited only his departure from the scene. “The clenched fist of Dulles,” Emmet John Hughes wrote, was about to be replaced by “the outstretched hand of Eisenhower.”
In the aftermath of the GOP’s off-year election defeat, Hagerty had put together a long memorandum looking toward the 1960 election, in which Eisenhower, campaigning for a Republican successor, would stand on his record as a man of peace. Based on conversations with the President, it set forth as goals everything Dulles had resisted in his six years at Foggy Bottom. Its frank assumption was that the time had arrived for diplomatic flexibility. The President must take the center of the international stage, the Eisenhower-Hagerty memo held, as a peacemaker. Continuing, it declared that he must play this role in appearances at the United Nations, in journeys to the far corners of the world, including neutral India, and in a hospitable attitude toward suggestions that he participate in summit conferences and conversations with Russia’s Khrushchev.
The Soviet premier was ready for such overtures. In welcoming Premier Anastas Mikoyan home from a U.S. tour on January 26, 1959, Khrushchev had said that “the possibility of a thaw” in Russo-American relations was “not excluded.” “Everything possible” must be done to improve relations between the two superpowers, he said, for thermonuclear war was unthinkable; those in the West who said that Khrushchev was “more frightened of war than anyone else” were absolutely correct. As always, Dulles had replied that any meeting would have to be preceded by Soviet demonstrations of good faith, and that he doubted that there would be any, for the USSR, in his opinion, was committed to winning the cold war, not ending it. But this time another administration spokesman had expressed a different view. Vice President Nixon said that the United States also wanted a thaw, “because we realize that if there is none we will all be eventually frozen in the ice so hard that only a nuclear bomb will break it.”
On May 24 the death watch at Walter Reed ended with the bulletin: MR. JOHN FOSTER DULLES DIED QUIETLY IN HIS SLEEP AT 7:49 E.D.T. THIS MORNING. Already Undersecretary Christian A. Herter was running the State Department. His first priority was the most recent of the long, dreary series of crises over Berlin. Khrushchev had delivered an ultimatum to the western powers: if they weren’t out of the city in six months, the Red Army would throw them out. The characteristic Dulles response would have been a counter ultimatum and a show of strength, forcing a showdown on the brink of war. Eisenhower had taken a different tack. The President read a careful statement to a press conference declaring that if there was any shooting in Berlin it would be “to stop us from doing our duty. We are not saying that we are going to shoot our way into Berlin. We say we are just going to go and continue carrying out our responsibilities to those people. So that if we are stopped, it will be somebody else using force.” Herter treated the ultimatum as a maneuver in presummit bargaining, and that, it developed, was exactly what it was.
Once Dulles was in his grave, events moved with almost unseemly haste. Five weeks later, on June 28, Soviet Deputy Premier Frol R. Koslov led a delegation of Russian officials to New York to open a Soviet Exhibition of Science, Technology, and Culture. On July 11 Eisenhower personally drafted an invitation to Khrushchev to visit the United States. And on July 23, two months to the day after Dulles’s death, the Vice President of the United States was in Moscow to open an American National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, thus paying what Eisenhower called a “return courtesy” for the New York visit of the Soviet officials.
What followed can hardly be called a contribution to the slackening of East-West tensions, but it did provide some insight into the combative instincts of Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon. The exhibition’s most interesting display was a six-room model ranch house with a central viewing corridor, permitting visitors to see all its furnishings. The Soviet leader had worked himself into a rage over it. It touched a sensitive nerve; Russia’s sputniks had been built at the expense of consumer products and services. The opening of the fair was being televised in the USSR, and Khrushchev felt that he had been somehow outmaneuvered. He was spoiling for a fight. Nixon was the man to give it to him. The ceremony was to appear on American television, too. He expected to be the Republican presidential nominee next year, and whatever Hagerty’s views on campaign strategy, Nixon had plans of his own which did not include allowing himself to be bullied on TV by an angry Communist. The result was what the press called the “kitchen debate” or the “Sokolniki Summit.”
It began when they paused at the model home’s sleek, gadget-stocked kitchen. Nixon declared that this was a typical American house, and that almost any U.S. workman could afford it or one like it. The Soviet premier bridled.
KHRUSHCHEV: You think the Russians will be dumbfounded by this exhibit. But the fact is that all newly built Russian homes will have this equipment. You need dollars in the United States to get this house, but here all you need is to be born a citizen. If an American citizen does not have dollars he has the right to… sleep on the pavement. And you say we are slaves of Communism!
NIXON:…We don’t think this fair will astound the Russian people, but it will interest them just as yours interested us. To us diversity, the right to choose, the fact that we have a thousand different builders, that’s the spice of life. We don’t want to have a decision made at the top by one government officia
l saying that we will have one type of house. That’s the difference—
KHRUSHCHEV (cutting in): On political differences, we will never agree. If I follow you, I will be led astray by Mikoyan. He likes spicy soups and I don’t. But that doesn’t mean we differ.
NIXON: Isn’t it better to be talking about the relative merits of our washing machines than the relative strength of our rockets? Isn’t this the kind of competition you want?
KHRUSHCHEV (pushing his thumb against Nixon’s chest): Yes, that’s the kind of competition we want, but your generals say they are so powerful they can destroy us. We can also show you something so you will know the Russian spirit. We are strong, we can beat you. But in this respect we can also show you something.
NIXON (wagging his finger at Khrushchev): To me, you are strong and we are strong. In some ways, you are stronger than we are. In others, we are stronger….
Pausing at a table of California wines, they scored their final points. Khrushchev proposed a toast “To peace and the elimination of all military bases on foreign lands.”
NIXON (without raising his glass): Let us just drink a toast to peace.
A RUSSIAN BYSTANDER: One hundred years to Premier Khrushchev!
NIXON: I will drink to that. We may disagree with your policy, but we want you to be of good health. May you live to be one hundred years old.
KHRUSHCHEV (after the toast): At ninety-nine years of age we shall discuss these questions further. Why should we be in haste?
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 128
